USU expecting birth of cloned cow in November
In 1992, the animal science department at Utah State University began researching cloning. Now, expecting the birth of a cloned cow in November. The department has been working on the project in collaboration with another group in the Boise area.
Dr. Kenneth White, a professor of reproductive biology in the animal and veterinary science department, heads the project.
“It’s really got the potential to have a tremendous impact on mankind directly, not just for the agricultural perspective,” White said.
He said the group has had success in the past with cows and sheep, but more recent projects involving rabbits and an endangered breed of wild sheep have not been successful.
The project is receiving funding through a National Institute of Health grant from a company called X-Y Genetics, whose goal is to identify production traits like milk and better carcasses for leather.
White said the cow used to create the clone was a Holstein who produced more than 50,000 pounds of milk in a 4- to 5-year period. This is more than twice the normal amount.
“She’s a tremendous animal,” White said.
Currently, the cow is in its third trimester at 180 days. White said the first and second trimesters are the most risky of losses at 50 and 25 percent respectively. The last trimester only has about a 10 to 15 percent loss, but he had a colleague cloning buffaloes in Thailand who lost the fetus in the last week.
“I try not to get too excited,” White said.
USU’s lab is producing the embryos which are implanted in recipients. They are then taken by the Idaho co-operators who manage the pregnancy and care of the animals.
From 10 transfers, only about one to two of the recipient cows will become pregnant at best, White said.
“It is a truly collaborative project,” he said. “They’re really in good care.”
To create the clone, White uses a microscope and micro-manipulators to take the chromosomes out of an egg cell and put an adult cell inside. Then, they fuse the two together.
The eggs are harvested from slaughter houses, and about 10 come from each ovary, he said.
They’ve been working for years studying the messages sperm use to tell an egg it’s fertilized. It then takes about seven to eight days before the cells are ready to transplant.
With White and another visiting scientist working, they can produce 150 to 200 of these clones per day. Only 10 to 15 percent of these will develop.
“Sometimes it does get repetitive, but it’s still fun. I like to have a small part in making a baby cow,” he said.
White said this project will probably continue for another year. They don’t have plans for different animals, yet. They are now trying to make the process more efficient by eliminating losses. They are also trying to understand why the losses exist. They’d like to increase the percentage of clones that develop to 30 to 40 percent.
White said he’d like to do more research with the wild sheep – which had not been sufficiently funded to complete. One of the sheep in the previous projects carried a fetus for 40 days. He believes with more funding it will be successful.
“We’ll see where this research takes us,” he said. “It could open the door to something else.”
“I don’t think there’s any reason it can’t be done. Once the technology is in place it sometimes takes brute force, but if you keep doing it, eventually it works.” said John Morrey, a research professor at USU.
For some groups of people, the idea of cloning is unethical and immoral. This has become a topic of continual debate.
Many people have a misconception about animal cloning because they automatically lump it with human cloning. The two are entirely different from an ethical perspective, Morrey said.
The researchers who first cloned Dolly the sheep didn’t even have the word “cloning” in their patent application, and had no intention whatsoever to move toward human cloning. Ethics are defined by what the common man thinks is good or bad. The vast majority of people see a difference in the ethics surrounding people and animals, he said.
“Most people feel ethics are more stringent with people,” Morrey said.
Some of the things that make human cloning repulsive are ideas that it could break down the family structure because a father and mother are not required in this type of asexual reproduction. These problems are not involved with animal cloning, Morrey said, because animals don’t have those family ties.
With the ethics around animal testing, Morrey said they look at the welfare of the animals and the purpose behind the testing.
The purpose in this project is to improve meat composition, marketability for the livestock industry, food producers and consumers benefit.
“There’s no more added distress with this than with any typical farming operation,” Morrey said.
The success of the technology has lead to an increase of a lab per month, White said.
White currently employs some undergraduates through work study, two graduate students, a lab technician and a visiting scientist.
He teaches two classes in the Spring. One on animal reproduction for undergraduates and one on reproductive technology for graduates.